Category Archives: media centre

Unable to load libcec.so on Kodi

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As part of a complete re-vamp of my home media setup (blog post coming soon on that!), I found myself trying to connect a Sony TV to an Intel NUC running Kodi v16 via one of PulseEight‘s brilliant USB-CEC Adapters. However, no matter what I tried (combinations of cables, all the settings on the TV, different ports on the NUC etc) I could not get Kodi to recognise the adapter. Despite the Kodi Wiki page on CEC suggesting that this should plug-and-play, I did not get any suggestion from either the TV or Kodi that the CEC dongle was being recognised.

After quite a lot of searching in the wrong place (at first I was convinced that my fresh install of Kodibuntu wouldn’t be the root cause), I found a couple of log lines that finally pointed me in the right direction:

DEBUG: Loading: libcec.so.3.0
ERROR: Unable to load libcec.so.3.0, reason: libcec.so.3.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Turns out that Kodi is built against libcec.so.3.0, however the version in the repository (I believe that was bundled or at least suggested by Kodibuntu) is 3.1. Kodi should (theoretically) be built against libcec.so.3 (note the missing .0), which the appropriate symlinks would have taken care of, however it seems there are some changes between 3.0 and 3.1 that Kodi doesn’t like, so some simple switching of the links (I tried creating /usr/local/lib/libcec.so.3.0 -> /usr/local/lib/libcec.so.3.1, which in hindsight isn’t a great idea) caused various crashes that I wasn’t prepared to start debugging – so instead I used the suggestion in this forum thread:

$ apt-get install --reinstall libcec3=3.0.1-1~trusty

Which will put the old version of libcec on your machine. After a quick reboot, Kodi instantly recognised the CEC dongle as promised, and it has been working beautifully ever since!

PCTV tripleStick 292e with TVHeadend

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I’ve blogged before about my home AV set up, but something I’ve not talked about is the recent addition of a couple of TV tuners so that I can watch and record live Freeview channels. Until recently I’d been using TVHeadend version 3.2 on a Raspberry Pi, with a PCTV nanoStick T2 that worked out of the box on Raspbian for me. However, the time came when I wanted to be able to record and/or view multiple channels at once, so I set about getting a second tuner to be able to do this. Through a lack of attention paid while ordering, I ended up with a PCTV tripleStick rather than a second nanoStick, and this one sadly was not as easy to set up. I bounced around a lot of forums and blog posts in getting mine working, so I thought I’d consolidate my learnings here, in the hope that someone else may find this useful!

First off, the chipset on the tripleStick (Silicon Labs Si2168) is different to the nanoStick (Sony CXD2820R), hence the incompatibility with the old drivers. There’s a very detailed teardown and comments at Antti’s LinuxTV Blog which does a great job of explaining what’s under the hood, and the comments do offer some useful guidance (but also some misdirection!). I was previously running an older version of Raspbian (kernel 3.12 if I recall correctly), which failed to recognise the tripleStick as a DVB tuner at all, but several sources suggested that firmware was included in 3.16 and higher. I updated my Raspberry Pi with the usual apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade to move up to a newer kernel version (3.18) which did get the dongle recognised in TVHeadend, however it appeared to not get any signal, despite being plugged in to the same aerial as the working nanoStick.

At this point I attempted upgrading to TVHeadend 4.0, something I should have done a considerable time ago anyway, however this had no effect and the dongle continued to show no signal through TVHeadend. Checking my logs, I found that my /var/log/syslog had repeated entries referring to “found a 'Silicon Labs Si2168' in cold state“, and claiming that firmware files had not been found. Many different message boards carried many different links to firmware, and suggesting different combinations that needed to be installed, several of which I found to be corrupt, however the one that worked for me was installed using the following:

$ wget http://palosaari.fi/linux/v4l-dvb/firmware/Si2168/dvb-demod-si2168-02.fw -O /lib/firmware/dvb-demod-si2168-02.fw

There are many suggestions that the file dvb-demod-si2168-b40-01.fw is also needed from that same source, however it seems to be working fine for me without this present. I’ve seen some reports that the tuner should appear as two separate entries in TVHeadend (one as a DVB-T tuner, and another as a a DVB-S), however since I’m only using DVB-T I’ve not seen any problems – your mileage may vary!

Managing music with beets

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In a previous post, I talked about how I use Subsonic in order to make my entire music collection available over the internet to either my phone, or any computer via its web-interface. I’m still using Subsonic to achieve this, but had one fairly major gripe left with the set-up – I was managing the library on disk manually. Subsonic is great for editing ID3 tags on individual songs, but it relies on files being in sensible per-album folders in order to populate its library, something which I very quickly got fed up of doing manually.

I’ve known for some time about the Musicbrainz project, which maintains a database of all music releases, and has a number of applications built on top of it which will scan, tag and move your music collection as desired. I recall using Musicbrainz Picard back in the day to sort my library before I moved to hosting music on my own server, but never found anything similar that I could run on my Ubuntu server, until now. Enter beets.

Beets is a program that will manage your entire music library, allowing command line access, and interfaces directly with the Musicbrainz API to tag tracks appropriately. Plugins for beets also allow you to update genres according to Last.fm, download cover art (which Subsonic will quite nicely pick up!), and even acoustically fingerprint unknown files to figure out what they are!

Installing Beets was as simple as following the instructions on their getting started guide, however importing my existing music proved a little more tricky, and I had a few false-starts at doing this. I eventually found that the easiest way to do this was to move my existing collection into a separate folder, and set up beets to sort my collection back into the original place. The ~/.config/beets/config.yaml file I ended up using looks like this:

directory: /media/music
library: /media/backup/beets/musiclibrary.blb
import:
    write: yes
    move: yes
    resume: yes
replace:
    '[\\/]': _
    '^\.': _
    '[\x00-\x1f]': _
    '[<>:"\?\*\|]': _
    '\.$': _
    '\s+$': ''
art_filename: cover
plugins: fetchart embedart lastgenre

Put simply, my music lives in /media/music (an NFS share), with my library file on a separate backup share. When importing files, I want them writing (moving) to their new location, so all I need to do is run beet import New\ Album/ and the files will be tagged and moved into place (with most dodgy characters removed – unfortunately some special characters still seem to slip through). Album art is also downloaded into the new folder as cover.jpg, embedded into the files themselves, and also the genre field is populated using Last.fm. A nightly scan configured in Subsonic picks up the new files and adds them into the library, making them available to listen!

The next step for me is to integrate importing into the same process as my automatic sorting of TV shows, as I currently still need to manually import newly downloaded tracks. However, even this is a massive improvement on the tedious processed previously needed for getting OCD-quality tags on new music!!

Media storage & sorting

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It’s been a long time (over a year in fact) since I last blogged about my home AV setup, and I left the last post on a real cliffhanger – how do I sort and store all these videos? Well, wait in suspense no longer, because here’s the answer!

Firstly, a bit about the storage – for a while, I have crammed more and more hard-drives into a single old desktop machine that I re-purposed to be my media centre/SVN repository/Tomcat/Apache/seedbox/etc, but it was getting to the point where I had files spread across 3 different drives, and no redundancy in the event of drive failure. Given I’ve had more than a few drives die on me recently, some sort of recovery strategy was becoming very necessary. We’re not talking small size requirements here either – somehow I’ve managed to accrue over 4TB of videos, music, pictures and other files. With these requirements in mind, I went shopping for some sort of Network Attached Storage style of device, but with more of a DIY edge to it. Having looked closely at Drobo and the like, I decided I’d rather have full control of the OS and RAID setup; the idea of not knowing what’s going on under-the-hood, and not being able to recover the data apart from on another Drobo, was not appealing at all. I ended up getting a HP ProLiant N40L Microserver, sadly well after the £100 rebate ended, but still at a very good price for a decent specification of machine and a nicely engineered case. I moved the 250GB system drive to the optical drive bay as documented here, in went three 3TB hard drives, on went a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.04.2 server, and I was away. The fourth drive port on the ProLiant is left empty for now, with a view to putting in another 3TB drive when I eventually run out of space again.

I’ve heard interesting things about ZFS recently, but decided to stick with what I know, and set up a RAID5 array across the three disks, giving me 6TB usable space, and allowing for the failure of any single disk. This arrayis then shared over NFS so that my other server can access to add files, and my Mac Mini (running XBMC) can access the content to display on the TV.

So, travelling back to the end of my last post on my home media setup – how do we sort the files we’ve downloaded to keep them in an OCD-friendly manner? The answer – SortTV. This program is one that I wish I had found years ago, it does a fantastic job of looking up program metadata on various sites (IMDB and TheTVDB I believe) and then moving files into sub-folders per-programme and -series, or per-movie, and also downloading artwork for XBMC and the like to show. I’m not going to go into much more detail on how I set this up, there are great instructions available on configuring it for your system. One recommendation I will make is to use something like trickle to limit the bandwidth available for moving when you’re using NFS, otherwise it can grind things to a halt if moving several large files. I ended up with the following in my crontab:

30 * * * * trickle -s -d 100 -u 500 perl /path/to/sorttv/sorttv.pl

So that’s it! I think I’ve finally reached the end of this mini-series on how my home AV setup works, more than 2 years after I first set out writing it. I’m sure I’ll be back on the subject at some point soon though, something is bound to break…

Dishing up videos

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Continuing my line of posts about my home media setup, I come to the main reason for putting myself through all this pain – being able to watch my selection of movies and TV shows with (next to) zero effort required.

I’ve posted before about the merits of XBMC, an open-source project to create a digital media hub that is accessible to all. I’ve not had anything better recommended since, so I’m still using this as my main 10-foot UI on my new TV, running off the Mac Mini I bought 18 months ago to start doing some iPhone development work. I didn’t really appreciate the iOS SDK, but the Mac Mini makes a fantastic media centre PC! The box is pretty much silent, the Apple Remote is pretty intuitive for getting around XBMC and similar interfaces, and they’re available on eBay for pretty reasonable prices. I may get fed up of Apple one day and revert to a custom built media box, but for now, the Mini will do!

I’ll post at some point in the future about how I actually store my files (it’s all about to change anyway, I’m running out of space!) but the stuff I’m using for downloading and sorting downloads is pretty neat if I do say so myself! A caveat at this point – I’m not publicly condoning the below, I obey the law when it comes to content – so should you!

First up – iPlayer. This part is only applicable in the UK (currently), so feel free to skip this paragraph if you’re viewing from overseas. There is a fantastic package available called get_iplayer that allows you to set a list of desired programmes, and then run a cron script to download them. For instance, the following will install the package, and add Have I Got News For You to your PVR.

$ sudo apt-get install get-iplayer
$ get-iplayer --pvradd "HIGNFY" "Have I Got News For You"

You’ll then need to add get-iplayer to your crontab (using crontab -e or similar) and fire it off every so often:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/get_iplayer --pvr --modes flashhd,flashvhigh,flashhigh --output /home/matt/DownloadComplete/

Will schedule get-iplayer to run every hour, on the hour, and attempt to download your content in HD, then descend through quality if necessary, and output the files to /home/matt/DownloadComplete/ (change as appropriate).

Update 11/02/12 – Since writing this, I’ve updated my get-iplayer cron job to be the following, which is a bit more useful when it comes to sorting – more on that in a future post!

15,45 * * * * /usr/bin/get_iplayer --pvr --vmode=flashhd,flashvhigh,flashhigh --output /home/matt/Download/ --command='mv "<filename>" "/home/matt/DownloadComplete/<fileprefix>.<ext>"' --file-prefix="<nameshort> <senum>" --whitespace

Next up, fetching non-UK TV shows. There is a fantastic website called ShowRSS that lets you build custom RSS feeds of popular (and unpopular, they cover 267 shows at the time of writing) TV show torrents, which can then be used by most good torrent software to automagically add torrents as they become available. One very good way of achieving this downloading of torrents is Flexget (again, available in Ubuntu and other systems with a simple apt-get install flexget), which is a package for parsing the data returned from feeds such as ShowRSS, and performing the necessary logic to download the actual .torrent file. Once again, we need to add Flexget to our crontab, set to run hourly (in a slightly fancier way!) 

@hourly /usr/local/bin/flexget --cron

Flexget uses a configuration file to determine what to do each time it’s run, which can be found in ~/.flexget/config.yml. As you may notice, it uses YAML (pronounced like camel) to store the preferences. YAML confused the hell out of me initially, but it’s all in the spacing! An example of my (truncated) config.yml is below.

feeds:
  tv-shows:
    rss: http://showrss.karmorra.info/rss.php?user_id=[REMOVED]&hd=null&proper=null
    series:
      - ncis
      - ncis:la
      - family guy:
          min_quality: hdtv
      - futurama
    download: ~/watch/

As you can see, this uses the tv-shows rss plugin to get my ShowRSS feed, then scans for the series listed (I believe you can do a catch-all rather than repeating the list), and then downloads the files into ~/watch/ – this will be useful in a minute. You can view Flexgets status on individual series using the following:

$ flexget --series
 Name                          Latest              Status               
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Ncis                          S09E11 - 14d 20h    *hdtv                
 Ncis:La                       S03E11 - 14d 20h    *hdtv                
 Futurama                      S06E26 - 109d 12h   *hdtv                        
 Family Guy                    S10E09 - 16d 21h    *hdtv                             
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amazing! Now we’ve got our files downloaded and going into ~/watch/ automatically. Now, to actually download them…

For my torrenting needs, I use rTorrent (again, packages available for Ubuntu in the repositories), which runs quite nicely in a detached screen downloading my files for me! rTorrent uses a file called ~/.rtorrent.rc for its settings, an example exert from mine:

schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent
schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
directory = ./Download/
system.method.set_key = event.download.finished,move_complete,"execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,~/DownloadComplete/;d.set_directory=~/DownloadComplete/"

dht=on
dht_port=6881
peer_exchange=yes
port_range = 7000-7500

This makes rTorrent keep an eye on the ~/watch directory for any files with the .torrent extension, and will add them to the active downloads if a new one is discovered, and remove any that are deleted. All torrents are downloaded into ~/Download/, but moved to ~/DownloadComplete/ when finished, for reasons that will be evident soon. DHT is enabled, and rTorrent will choose a random port between 7000 and 7500 on load.

So that’s all of our media downloading (you can add music/movies manually, or do some other clever scripts – I have an IRC bot that I’ll blog about in future do it for me!), but how do we sort that off into the right places for XMBC to find? It would be terribly inelegant just to make XBMC look in ~/DownloadComplete for it’s files… Well, that’s a question for a future post!!

Dishing up music

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I’ve been meaning for a long time to continue my line of posts about my home media set up. Anyone who vaguely knows me (or stalks this blog) will know that I recently moved down to London, into a flat I can (sort of) call my own, so for the first time I’ve been able to play about with AV equipment in my way!

In this first post, I’m going to talk a bit about how I’m currently using the set up to serve my music collection around the flat, to work, and to my phone for on-the-go listening. It’s worth noting at this point that everything here relies on an old machine running Ubuntu server that’s currently sat in my cupboard, a solution that won’t work for everyone…

I’ve mentioned previously that I was looking into using DAAP to get at my music. This ended pretty quickly when I realised the clients available for listening are fairly crap. The actual configuration is fiddly, and I was after a nice functional GUI to access my music through. DAAP failed at pretty much all of this, so I went in search of another solution. After trying many different software packages (commercial and otherwise), I struck upon Subsonic, which seemed at first glance to do everything I was after. Essentially, it requires a server (available for all platforms) with access to your music collection, and will then spit the content back out to its own web UI (accessible through a personal URL if you’re not like me and running some kind of dynamic DNS service) plus it has a number of native players available for different platforms (including mobile). Best of all – it’s free! They withhold some features until you’ve given a small donation, but it’s entirely usable as a free package!

The web UI is basic, but skinnable (I’m still working with the basic skin – works well), and gives you access at a glance to all your artists, albums and playlists (although I’ve not done much with playlists yet, that part does seem a bit tricky). This UI also lets you play with the ID3 tags on your music, including the grabbing of album artwork off the internet, so if you’re as OCD as me about music tagging, your needs are well catered for! Within the web application your play queue appears at the bottom, with the current playing song in a lovely flash player. From the main window you can add things onto the end of the play queue, or change the playing song entirely. It’s basic, but functional, and if you want anything more advanced there are a number of native players available for all operating systems.

What interested me most was the quality of the iOS native applications. I’ve tried all of the ones recommended on Subsonics App page, and a couple that are in the app store but not endorsed officially, but I have now struck upon iSub as a favourite. It allows the caching of songs on your phone for playback when no data signal is available (although you have to have played the song for it to be cached – I’d like a feature where you could pre-cache songs to the phone), plus it integrates nicely with the iOS player API (play/pause whilst locked etc).

One other massive bonus was my discovery of a XMBC plugin for Subsonic (XMBC is what I use to browse media on my TV, as I’ve mentioned previously, more in a future post). This lets me listen to songs through my TV in the flat without having to bother turning a computer on – a massive bonus, and much more sociable if you have company!

The only downside of Subsonic is the reliance on a stable internet connection to an always-on music server. There are commercially hosted solutions available, but since I already had a machine running 24/7, and have recently splashed out on Virgin Media’s 30Mb fibre connection, it made sense to run the package from home.

So there it is – a whole-hearted recommendation for Subsonic (they’re honestly not paying me for this!) and it’s associated other applications. Tune in soon for a peek into the world of my TV/Movie system!

XBMC – My Experience

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Over the Christmas holidays I got a bit bored (as you do), and decided to experiment with an old projector, turning my bedroom wall into a giant monitor!

I’ve been looking for some time to find a decent ‘10 foot UI‘, and from initial glances at the internet all fingers were point towards Apples FrontRow, however I didn’t want to sacrifice the Mac Mini to run as a media PC (although it would do a very good job – virtually silent!). I decided to go slightly off the beaten track and try XBMC (Xbox Media Centre as was).

I must say I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up and configure – within a few minutes I had a working interface that looked great, it was playing nicely with my network to drag videos off my main PC and download box (headless machine running get_iplayer and rtorrent in a cupboard, more on that in another post). My only major gripe is that the navigation is fairly awful – whether you’re using a keyboard or mouse (or a remote I presume), I can’t seem to figure out whether I’m needing to go forwards/backwards/up/down on the menus, and a lot of functionality seems to be duplicated.

The process of gathering TV and film information is pretty seamless, the scanner seems to run nicely in the background gathering data on my files, even though they’re sat on another machine. I’ve noticed a few false positives for TV shows, and you definitely need to do some config file editing to get TV files picked up.

I unfortunately don’t have the right kit at the moment to try and get live TV displayed through XBMC as well (from forum browsing it seems possible), although I have installed the iPlayer and YouTube extensions, both of which seem to be quite buggy. The iPlayer extension inparticular has some pretty major issues – trying to pause a video will cause the whole program to lock up!

Overall – I’m pretty happy with this solution for the meantime. Anyone who’s happy hacking around with setting files to get things working just how they want should be right at home, but I wouldn’t really recommend to anyone who’s after an ‘out of the box’ solution.